One New Achievement: OneDrive Premiers on Xbox One

By Alex Brown | Small Business

One New Achievement: OneDrive Premiers on Xbox OneMicrosoft’s efforts to roll out OneDrive, the new name for their cloud storage solution, continued last week with an update to the Xbox One’s SkyDrive App. It’s now OneDrive, but more interestingly, it now has added Xbox Achievements.

If you’re not familiar with the Xbox One or its predecessor, the Xbox 360, Achievements are small rewards given to gamers for reaching certain milestones while playing games. Strike out three batters in a baseball game? That’s an Achievement. Wipe out a ton of zombies without getting bitten once? That’s an Achievement.

The addition of Achievements represents a second step in Microsoft’s ongoing effort to introduce gamers to the benefits and features of OneDrive. As we wrote about back when the service was still SkyDrive, the Xbox One uses OneDrive to allow gamers to share highlights of their wins (or fails) online. While that feature integrates directly with the way gamers use their console, the new Achievements for OneDrive push gamers outside of just playing the Titanfall beta.

With Achievements that reward gamers for viewing 10 photos from their camera roll, viewing 100,000 photos, and adding a shared folder to OneGuide, it’s clear that Microsoft is intending these Achievements to serve as gateways for gamers to use OneDrive not just on their Xbox One, but also on their mobile device and PC.

The OneDrive functionality that allows gamers to share video replays is already seeing widespread use, but how successful will this new strategy be? One roadblock may be the lack of achievement points tied to the OneDrive Achievements. Game developers working with the Xbox One have 1000 Achievement points to allocate through their game. How gamers earn those games is totally up to the designers, and the pursuit of those points has helped encourage gamers to explore every part of the game. Whether or not gamers still want to rack up Achievements in OneDrive if it doesn’t add to their Gamerscore is yet to be seen.

Whether or not OneDrive catches on with gamers, the integration between Xbox One and OneDrive shows the potential the game console has to expand Microsoft’s footprint within the gaming community. The Xbox brand started back in 2001, when it was just a gaming console. More than 12 years later, the hardware has capabilities far beyond just playing games. If you were sixteen when you got your first Xbox, you’re 28 now, and Microsoft seems poised to turn this older generation of gamers into users of their other products. Are we going to see Sharepoint or Office Web Apps extended to the console? Xbox One is already pitched as a center for entertainment. Turning it into a productivity center (or at least a place to check e-mails) may not be as far of a stretch as it seems.